Strange things Web Sites do!

re: Strange things Web Sites do!

steve_web — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 20:18:09 GMT

I agree, not very accessible, however, since SPAM is such a huge issue, when attempting to publicly provide an email address... there's limited options.

As soon as the address is a readable string by wget, or any other screen scraping tool, you're out of luck...

I'd be interested in your solutions... as would all web developers fighting this since the 90's.

re: Strange things Web Sites do!

DMassy — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 22:40:34 GMT

Steve,

I agree spam is really annoying but hiding email addresses in inaccessible ways is clearly not an acceptable solution.

I'm not an expert in any way on spam filters but there are plenty of pretty effective spam filters supplied on even free email accounts these days and that is where efforts need to be made.

Spam is annoying but I sometimes wonder if the problem is overstated a little. My own email address is pretty discoverable on the web DMassy@microsoft.com so I get quite a bit of spam. However it isn't anywhere near the point where I cannot cope with it with Exchange and Outlook filtering out the worst of it quite effectively. I think the antiphishing filter introduced in IE7 helps protect people but that's not going to help with spam.

I liken it to the junk mail I get at home which just goes straight in the bin unread. That is annoying to me more for the complete waste of the worlds resources than the time it takes me to throw it away. I'd love to see our society take steps to limit that issue. On a related note here in the US they introduced a "Do not call" registry to limit nuisance phone calls with people trying to sell you stuff you don't need. Once I got on that list I felt I could answer the phone again as it had got to the stage where I just let calls go to voicemail and rarely picked up the phone! Unfortunately these businesses see enough of a return on investment to keep sending unwanted stuff to people in physical mail, email and phone calls.

Thanks

-Dave

re: Strange things Web Sites do!

Erik Arvidsson — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 00:52:11 GMT

Here is a CSS rule I've seen on msdn.microsoft.com:

pre {

white-space: normal

}

...makes all the code snippets unreadable in all browsers that correctly support the CSS white-space property. Pretty strange to me.

re: Strange things Web Sites do!

DMassy — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 08:30:14 GMT

Great feedback Erik. I'll pass it onto the MSDN team.

Thanks

-Dave

re: Strange things Web Sites do!

Andrei Ignat — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 17:04:01 GMT

For steve_web:

For hiding emails, you can have partial solution here:

http://serviciipeweb.ro/WebServices/HideEmail.aspx

Enter your email and press result!